Making great wine is markedly different from other accomplishments. It is an art that has been compared to poetry and painting. The essentials of winemaking can be mastered with simple learning, but the spirit of great wine cannot be taught.
The poetic spirit sometimes gives wine lasting integrity. This is one of many complex stages in the development of great wine. Many now understand that this requires returning to the common sense that guided winemakers of old. It also requires an eye that observes nature and knows how wine itself is entwined with the earth.
Wine is everything I know of the earth. Every day it reminds me of how I am woven into the fabric of mineral and soil and sunlight. Wine is part of the earth cycle that makes life new again and revives poetic spirit. As far as the eye of the painter, from the beginning of pink bud break, through green leaves of summer and autumn’s ripe fruit, and to winter’s rainy skies and misty mountains –I spend a lot of time watching these changes, and I keep reaching out to the beauty that surrounds earth and wine. Every day it reminds me how everything will pass away and come back and blossom again.-Gary M Johnson, proprietor